What is xquartz for
What is xquartz for install#
While we’re at it, we should also install some dependencies that will come up in your use of R. My preferred method of doing this is via conda. The third prerequisite is that you need RStudio installed somehow on your HPC system. If you’re on Mac, you’ll need to download XQuartz, and if you’re on PC, it’ll be Xming. The X11-related software you’ll need on your computer differs based on whether you are a Mac or a PC. Namely, we’ll use XQuartz to visualize this incoming data stream, which is the second prerequisite. So we’re taking the visual output that the HPC can generate but doesn’t have the display to visualize, and sending it somewhere on our own computer. Your HPC system needs to be set up for X11 forwarding, which is a way to access the graphical window being spun up by the remote system (with access to all the files on that system) on your own computer. The first thing is the most important, and it’s a little bit out of your hands.
The perhaps most frequent situations are visualizing/exploring data and debugging.įor this tutorial, you’ll need a few things.
There are many occasions when doing “big data”-esque work on an HPC in which you may need access to an IDE. RStudio is a clean IDE that allows you to simultaneously view your filesystem, environment variables, R scripts, and console, and is all very specifically tailored to R, which is important in many cases ( R is an amazing but finicky language).
And there are still a lot of reasons to use it, even if you’ve gotten used to something like Spyder or Jupyter. RStudio was once my favorite and most often-used IDE.